KickBack - The Global Anticorruption Podcast

This week we have a special episode in which Dr. Ina Kubbe (political scientist, University of Tel Aviv, https://www.inakubbe.com/) interviews Dr. Doron Navot (political scientist, University of Haifa (https://haifa.academia.edu/DNavot). Corruption charges against PM Benjamin Netanyahu and the divided society After Doron gives a short overview of his work on corruption and populism, the interview...

During his last visit to Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Matthew took the opportunity to interview Roberto de Michele (@rodemichele61) and Francesco De Simone, both Modernization of the State experts. As usual, the interview kicks off with providing some information on both interviewees’ background and motivation to do work on (anti-)corruption. The interview pursues to outline the four mai...

This week’s episode features Gary Kalman, the director of the US office of Transparency International in Washington. Work of the FACT coalition (https://thefactcoalition.org/) The FACT coalition has been pushing regulation on anonymous companies. One key element is beneficial ownership (check out our episode with Elise Bean). The principle is simple: When you register a company, you have to name t...

We welcome Andrés Hernández (@hmandres2011), executive director of Transparency International Colombia (Transparencia por Colombia), to this week’s episode of KickBack - The Global Anti-Corruption Podcast. 1. Corruption in the judiciary system The first part of the interview focuses on the challenge of corruption in the Colombian judiciary system. Andrés outlines that according to the latest resul...

New year This week on KickBack: Charles Davidson former Executive Director of the Kleptocracy Initiative at Hudson Institute, Publisher & CEO of The American Interest Magazine. The interview covers how the book Capitalism's Achilles Heel by Raymond Baker inspired Charles’ impressive work. For example Charles was involved in: - together with Francis Fukuyama founding of American Interest Magazin: h...

For this special episode Nils and Christopher sat down to reflect on the first 20 episodes of Kickback and discuss some plans for the 2020. For those who want to support us financially to cover our running costs: https://www.patreon.com/kickbackpodcast For those who want to follow us via Social Media: https://twitter.com/KickbackGAP https://www.facebook.com/KickBackGAP The Kickback team wishes you...

This week on Kickback: Leonor Ortiz Monasterio (https://contralacorrupcion.mx/leonor-ortiz-monasterio/) and Miguel Alfonso Meza (Twitter: @MiguelMezaC). They describe their work for the Anti-Corruption Organization “Mexicanos contra la corrupción y la impunidad” (Mexicans against corruption and impunity, (https://contralacorrupcion.mx/). They outline how the anger about corruption inspired them to...

Our guest this week is Monika Bauhr, Associate Professor at the Quality of Government at the University of Gothenburg (https://tinyurl.com/s37x2lp). The interview kicks off with Monika describing how her work on climate change led her to get interested in corruption, showing how the technical solutions for Climate change were known but that it often lacked political will to implement them. The int...

This week on KickBack: Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times correspondent David Barboza (Twitter: @DavidBarboza2). The interview begins with a deep dive into David’s famous investigation into the vast wealth of the Chinese elite. You can read the NYT articles in the Archive here: https://tinyurl.com/ygh8xhz9. David outlines the challenges and unexpected breaks in investigating such highly sensiti...

The interview kicks off with Shaul outlining how the EU Anti-corruption report served as a motivation Shaul to do corruption research and why psychologists have only more recently started to get interested in corruption. To give listeners an idea how behavioral scientists seek to understand corruption and unethical behavior more broadly, Shaul and Nils discuss behavioral ethics, an interdisciplina...

For this episode of Kickback we are delighted to welcome Kevin E. Davis, Beller Family Professor of Business Law at NYU. (https://its.law.nyu.edu/facultyprofiles/index.cfm?fuseaction=profile.overview&personid=22193). The interview covers Kevin’s new book Between Impunity and imperialism, the challenges of fighting and deterring transnational bribery and the return of stolen assets. The interview b...

This episode we are excited to welcome Sergei Guriev (Twitter: @sguriev), the chief economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Academic work: The interview kicks off with a discussion of Sergei’s academic work in the early 2000’s. In it Sergei and Andrei Rachinsky studied the Role of oligarchs in Russian capitalism and showed that oligarchs owned around 40% of the Russian i...

Kieu Vien, Founder and exec director towards transparency in Vietnam (https://towardstransparency.vn/en/) The interview begins by Kieu outlining a meaningful encounter with a woman who experienced the frustrating consequences of corruption first hand that sparked her to found towards transparency in 2007. First organization on corruption when it was still a taboo to work on anti-corruption which l...

The interview this week features Cristina Bicchieri – the S. J. Patterson Harvie Professor of Social Thought and Comparative Ethics at University of Pennsylvania. The Kickback interview kicks off with Cristina’s early work on corruption in the mid 1990’s together with the physicist Carlo Rovelli (1995) and John Duffy (1997) and how this work was sparked by the mani pulite scandal in Italy. This th...

This episode of KickBack features Oguzhan “Oz” Dincer, who is an Associate Professor of Economics and the Director of the Institute for Corruption Studies at the Illinois State University. Listen to how the famous research on the so-called fair wage hypothesis (Akerlof & Yellen, 1990; Soraperra et al.,) triggered Oz’s interest in corruption. Measurement of Corruption The interview covers Oz’s rese...

Our next guest on kickback: Daria Kaleniuk (Twitter:@dkaleniuk), the executive director of the Anticorruption action centre (Twitter: @antAC_ua; website: www.antac.org.ua) The interview covers: How corruption prevented Daria from achieving change and how it inspired her to use international legal tools to tackle corruption within Ukraine. How the anti-corruption action center bridges the work betw...

This time on the podcast: Elise Bean, from the permanent sub-committee on investigation (PSI: https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/subcommittees/investigations). The first part of the interview describes the work of the PSI which was set up by Harry Truman and was the first to make #moneylaundering a crime. The discussion touches on the famous case of Raul Salinas that the PSI investigated and that drew d...

Join us this week for an interview on the FBI’s work on asset recovery, which countries are currently the main destinations for money laundering by international cleptocrats and how corruption directly contributes to war crimes and atrocities. Our guest this week is the Debra LaPrevotte. She is a Senior Investigator for The Sentry (https://thesentry.org/). Founded by George Clooney and John Prende...

Matthew Stephenson interviews Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, Professor of Democracy Studies at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin.

“We should stop thinking in terms how to solve corruption and start thinking in terms how to manage it” In this episode we are excited to welcome one of the world’s most influential #corruption researchers: Paul Heywood (@pmheywood). The interview covers how the #manipulite scandal in the 90’s got Paul interested in corruption, how @TransparencyInternational’s #CPI helped to put corruption on the...

On this episode of Kickback, we are thrilled to welcome Pulitzer-prize winning investigative journalist Frederik Obermaier, working for Süddeutsche Zeitung best known for his work on the Panama Papers and the Strache Video. Part 1 #PanamaPapers (0:00-08:10): “It is only logical to tackle a transnational challenge like corruption with a transnational team” The first part of the interview describes...

Matthew Stephenson sits down with Bo Rothstein, who holds the holds the August Röhss Chair in Political Science and the co-founder of the Quality of Government Institute at the University of Gothenburg. The Kickback interview kicks off with the reasons how Bo got interested in corruption when working on the inefficiencies in public procurement and how these experiences led him to put “human well-b...

If you are interested in… …how average citizens could contribute to holding politicians more accountable? ..how transparency 2.0 might help to reduce corruption more effectively? …why politicians who campaigned strongly against corruption do not seem to follow through once they take office? … the current trends in anti-corruption in general, maybe even care about Latin America in particular? Then...

In this episode of the KickBack Global AntiCorruption, we are very happy to welcome Robtel Neajai Pailey – a Liberian academic, activist and author who is “maladjusted to injustice” – a quote from Cornel West. We discuss Robtel’s impressive work – ranging from her books, to stage play, Forum theatre, radio and even music videos in collaboration with Hip Hop Artist Takun J. You can find out all abo...

Matthew sits down with Deltan Dallagnol for an insightful interview. Many call it the biggest anti-corruption investigation that has ever occurred: the car wash investigation that originated in Brazil. This episode brings you a unique insight into the investigation by no other but the lead prosecutor himself, Deltan Dallagnol (on Twitter @deltanmd). To give you an idea of the size of the investiga...